Preferring Coherence

In the first part of this series, I tried to convince you that bias was a good thing, then I promised that I’d show you how that plays out in human behaviour. So let me recap the main idea to save you reading that first article again, and then I’ll get into showing you how. In this article it’ll be by showing you how the heavily flogged concept of cognitive dissonance is just another example of it too.

Find the rest of the series collected here.

If you already read the first part, then you can skip to the showing

¶Recap

Behavioural economists have the world terrified of biases. Groupthink, confirmation bias, negativity bias, optimism bias, etc, etc. You’ve probably read about at least one of them. You see, they:

work off the assumption that humans are ‘rational actors’. They call it the ‘rational-actor model’. The idea, more-or-less, is that if you give a human a decision to make, they will decide by optimising for their preferences, weighing up the costs and benefits. You do stuff that does the most good for you, and the least bad. On this model, errors should only happen when you don’t have the right information to make the ‘rational’ decision. … ‘biases’ … are times when we deviate from this model. When we make choices that are not optimised to our preferences, maximising benefit and minimising cost, despite having accurate information.

But statisticians don’t see bias this way, and the brain is much closer to a statistician than an economist. For them, bias is one half of a trade-off.

Bias is the opposite of noise, or variance. If you have a biased measure, it’s more precise. A noisy measure is more variable. But that’s orthogonal to accuracy—both biased and noisy measurements can be either accurate or inaccurate.

The idea is that, sometimes, you want to use your expectations and assumptions to ignore the noise, and see the picture more clearly. The trade-off is that, sometimes, the noise is useful or your expectations are off.

This is, more-or-less, what the brain does:

the brain, and nervous system more broadly, has to map all the noise out there in the world to produce the right response. Not only that, but it has to coordinate all the noise inside your body to do it. Nerves innervating, muscles activating, hormones sloshing around in glands.

And most of the time, this is predictable … the brain maps the predictable structure of the world and your actions within it. By paying attention to the predictable stuff, and biasing your actions as a response, it can ignore all the irrelevant noise that might lead you to make an error. This frees it up to do more complicated processing when it doesn’t know what to expect—when it needs to pay more attention to the noise.

So, that’s the first article. Let’s look at an example.

¶Managing cognitive tension

I explain cognitive dissonance in more detail in another article—it’s not exactly what everyone makes it out to be:

Festinger’s original idea comes in two parts. First, he noticed you could grab any two cognitions you might have—any two things you think or know—and find that they’re relevant or irrelevant to each other.
…
Festinger didn’t really care about irrelevant cognitions. But he was interested in the fact that if cognitions were relevant, then they might be either consonant—follow from each other—or dissonant—oppose each other.

That’s where the dissonance part of the term comes from.

Festinger then went on to think about how that dissonance can cause us discomfort which might make us want to resolve the dissonance. But, as that article points out, the dissonance doesn’t always have to cause discomfort:

When we hold dissonant cognitions—thoughts or observations about ourselves and our thinking and our behaving that are in tension with each other, whether it brings us discomfort or not, we will often reduce the dissonance. We might eliminate or downplay competing cognitions, or introduce and elevate consonant ones. It might happen to make us feel better, or to make us see ourselves in a better light, or simply because the mind is very efficient and will clean house when you’re not looking.

Now, cognitive dissonance is usually used in a way that implies the discomfort that might arise from the dissonant cognitions. But today we don’t want to use it like everyone else. Today we want to think about it a little more differently.

¶Cognitive Dissonance as Bias vs Noise

In my last article I linked off to a handful of extensions to cognitive dissonance theory that talk about how the discomfort seems to arise often from a desire to see ourselves in the world in a coherent way. So, Aronson wondered:

whether the discomfort from dissonant cognitions was due to some kind of conflict between a behaviour and our concept of ourselves.

And Heider proposed a “constancy motivation” as a primary reason for determining whether we change our minds or not.¹ Self-affirmation theory reckons that the discomfort comes when our self-integrity is under threat. And self-discrepancy theory reckons it happens when we see ourselves as too distant from our ideal selves. And then Self-Perception Theory reckons it happens when we perceive ourselves doing something, but have no good reason for it, so we make one up.

These theories are all fighting to sort-of win cognitive dissonance, but we don’t need to worry too much about the distinctions. What’s interesting is that they all highlight different kinds of cognitive dissonance that are around seeing ourselves as coherent in the world. And when we’re concerned with this coherency, we bias ourselves to reduce the dissonant cognitions and increase the consonant ones.

If we care about being coherent, we’ll make ourselves feel coherent. We’ll rationalise things to ourselves, or change our minds, or build an infrastructure of thinking around behaviours we can’t explain well.

And this thread of cognitive dissonance is, I think, the most important. It’s our default. We’d have a very hard time going around the world, aware of how incoherent we are all the time. How would we ever make decisions? Get anything done? So our mind smoothes these things over for us, introducing bias to eliminate how noisy we are. Introducing ideologies. And of course, in doing so, trades off the fact that this kind of smoothing means we’re going to ignore true noise. Maybe resist information that we shouldn’t, or deceive ourselves in maladaptive ways.

But, we aren’t always trying to reduce dissonance like this. Sometimes we’re perfectly happy to tolerate contradicting cognitions without trying to reconcile them.

In a previous article in this series, I pointed out:

When it comes to groups, this process of resolving dissonance plays out in a very interesting way. See, when you factor in groups, you don’t just have little pieces of yourself competing with each other, you also have your different group identities competing with each other.

That article is all about the smoothing I talked about earlier—about how all these individual pieces and different group identities become a problem:

when you’re trying to emphasise your relationship to one group, you don’t want to be all this messy stuff. You want to be part of one group. So you’re going to start to bias yourself. You’re going to do stuff that helps you ignore these noisily competing parts of yourself to be more precise to the group.

But the inverse is important too:

by prioritising group cohesion, we’re sacrificing diversity. Diversity of thought, and the highly-correlated diversity of background, has its own distinct benefits. And in the context of groups, diversity is the ‘noise’ to the increased cohesion that comes with ‘bias’.

Our noisy inner-selves might be competing, but they also have the potential to inject innovation. If we’re too precisely tuned to the group’s values, goals, and ways of being, then we’re going to miss angles and opportunities that different pieces of our individual identity, as well as our multiple group identities, might be more open to.

These things are true outside of groups as well. Creativity is all about incoherence:

Many domains of psychology consider effective problem solving a case of putting together ‘chunks’ of information into the correct sequence … Intuitive insight occurs when we are able to move beyond these familiar patterns and discover new ones … this is why intuitive insight feels so spontaneous. It is the unexpected combination of a pattern unfamiliar to the problem at hand with the problem, opening us up to the possibility of new ‘chunks’ of information, and new sequences of combination
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this is precisely the reason that insight dawns so often while doing something quite unrelated to the problem we face. In the shower, or washing dishes. We have released ourselves from those sequences and chunks, those patterns of being in the world, that we are used to inhabiting for such a problem. In doing so, we open ourselves to new patterns

Tolerating the noise in ourselves—the contradictions and the dissonant cognitions—corresponds to exactly this kind of looser and more exploratory cognitive style.

¶Outro

Cognitive dissonance is too big of a literature for any short article to capture all of it. But we shouldn’t always be afraid of our dissonant cognitions. Sometimes they cause us discomfort, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they bias us to smooth out the inconsistencies, and sometimes they don’t.

But in many ways, it’s just this very simple trade-off that the nervous system spends its time making. Are we biasing for the kind of coherence that gets things doing? Or are we opening ourselves to the noisiness that makes us robust to a very complex world?

It’s always a little of both.